I think I’ll just not say anything. And yet.

The death sentence by my imaginary vampire judge last week has been bothering me. Instead of hanging, firing squad, or a beheading, and other similar death sentences given out to me over the months, it was a delayed death. Instead of immediate execution, and becoming part of the physical universe, he being a vampire sentenced me to twenty years of healthy life no matter what happened around me.

I am now eighty-six years old, which would mean I would live to be one-hundred-six and in perfect health. Rather than an instant death in a few minutes, I would have an extraordinarily long and healthy life, so I was ecstatic. Yes, he said, that’s your punishment, and no matter how horrible the things that happen around you, they will not harm you physically in any way.

But wait! Is there more?

If those twenty years are as bad as this last one has been for humanity, it may become emotionally painful to live that long. If everything I love about the world is destroyed, there won’t be much left for me to love, and nothing to enjoy, or strive to attain. But, on the other hand, if I do find things to love in what is left of the shambles around me, that creates other things and people that I know will be taken away. It is horrible when everything one comes to value gets destroyed.

The climate forecasters say this spring’s hundred and ten-degree weather is the new normal for a few years, and then it will worsen. That can be adapted to inside my air-conditioned house for a while, but the beautiful Ponderosa forest surrounding it will not survive the scorching and parched weather. It will die and burn, or burn and die, and that is where I will live.

This last year’s political chaos isn’t just here in the US, but in many other counties, and that disorder coupled with climate problems will bring greater chaos. Across the world, many problems that can not be coped with now will explode in twenty years’ projection.

If I live for twenty years, nearly everything, perhaps everything I love or come to love, will get destroyed while I, helpless to prevent it from happening, will be compelled to watch and suffer.

My imaginary vampire judge gave a death sentence worse than immediate execution.